e, are but blackguard birds at best. He also rejoices in many
blue-jays, rescued from the Ganges, whereinto they were thrown as
offerings to the vengeful Doorga during the barbarous _pooja_ celebrated
in her name. Very proud, too, is Hastings Clive of his pigeons,--his
many-colored pigeons from Lucknow, Delhi, and Benares; an Oudean
bird-boy has trained them to the pretty sport of the Mohammedan princes,
and every afternoon he flies them from the house-top in flashing flocks,
for Hastings Clive's entertainment.

Hastings Clive has toys, the wooden and earthen toys for which Benares
was ever famous among Indian children,--nondescript animals, and as
non-descript idols,--little Brahminee bulls with bells, and artillery
camels, like those at Rohilcund and Agra,--Sahibs taking the air in
buggies, country-folk in hackeries, baba-logue in gig-topped ton-jons.
But much more various and entertaining, though frailer, are his Calcutta
toys, of paper, clay, and wax,--hunting-parties in bamboo howdahs, on
elephants a foot high, that move their trunks very cunningly,--avadavats
of clay, which flutter so naturally, suspended by hairs in bamboo cages,
that the cats destroy them quickly,--miniature palanquins, budgerows,
bungalows, and pagodas, all of paper,--figures in clay of the different
castes and callings, baboos, kitmudgars, washermen, barbers,
tailors, street-waterers, box-wallahs, (as the peddlers are called,)
nautch-girls, jugglers, sepoys, policemen, doorkeepers, dog-boys,--all
true to the life, in costume, attitude, and expression.

Statedly, on his birth-day, the Anglo-Indian child is treated to a
_kat-pootlee nautch_, and Hastings Clive has a birth-day every time he
conceives a longing for a puppet-show; so that our wilful young friend
may be said to be nine years, and about nineteen kat-pootlee nautches,
old.

To make a birth-day for Hastings Clive, three or four _tamasha-wallahs_,
or show-fellows, are required; these, hired for a few rupees, come from
the nearest bazaar, bringing with them all the fantastic apparatus of a
kat-pootlee nautch, with its interludes of story-telling and jugglery.
A sheet, or table-cloth, or perhaps a painted drop-curtain, expressly
prepared, is hung between two pillars in the drawing-room, and reaches,
not to the floor, but to the tops of the miniature towers of a silver
palace, where some splendid Rajah, of fabulous wealth and power, is
about to hold a grand _durbar_, or levee. All the pe